Research, definition, and design of reports detailing insulin pump and glucose sensor-derived data to enhance the care of patients with Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetes.
Why it works
While visiting endocrinology practices and talking with endocrinologists, nurses, diabetes educators, and clinic staff, we learned that there is very little standard about diabetes care save three facts:
- Practitioners have very little time to spend with their patients, so this time must not be taken up with paging through many pages of disorganized or out-of-context information,
- the collection of data and generation of reports is rarely done by the primary practitioner, and
- There are approximately thirty clinical questions that practitioners seek to answer about their patient’s recent health history and “glucose performance” that can be answered or investigation enhanced via device-derived treatment data.
It is these thirty or so questions that the above six reports answer. For the first time, glucose, carbohydrate, and insulin data from multiple treamtent devices (insulin pump, continuous glucose sensor, fingerstick blood glucose meters) are presented together, in context, showing patterns in a patient’s glucose response, areas where pump use or lifestyle changes are needed, and revealing the local history around adverse events.
What I’d change
We’ve crammed a lot of data into each report, prompting some warranted complaints about their complexity and density. Ever more fine-garined, complex, and feature-laden data is streaming from new and updated treatment devices, so this situation is not likely to improve. Instead, we must begin to bring patterns to the surface and name them so that the practitioner may verify the information and act upon it with a minimum of fuss.
